Claude Chabrol's death took everyone by surprise. Fit as a fiddle, he was as active at 80 as he was 50 years ago, making a film almost every year. In 2007, the Turin film festival programmed a retrospective of his films, there were so many of them, they had to stage their homage over two years. I religiously went to Turin, as in pilgrimage, and got hooked on Chabrol. There, I also met him and asked about his early memories as a boy during the war and then as a young cinephile in Paris for a radio programme I was producing.

There is nothing better than a thorough and intelligent retrospective to assess an artist's work. And heaven, what admirable films Chabrol gave us. From Les cousins in 1959, Les biches in 1968, La femme infidèle in 1969, Noces rouges in 1973, Violette Nozière in 1978 to Bellamy in 2009, Chabrol never ceased to be a truculent observer of the French bourgeoisie – truculent in both the French and English meanings of the term (colourful in French, aggressive in English).

With portraits of jealous husbands, idle wives, vengeful fathers, corrupt politicians, impotents and frigids, womanisers and nymphomaniacs, shy provincials in Paris and bourgeois killers, Chabrol's films are as much a study of a country and its people as an aestheticism with a certain penchant for glorifying actresses (Stéphane Audran, Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert among them).

"Chabrol was France" say many commentators today. It is true that his oeuvre, like Balzac's comédie humaine, is as much a mirror of France as a perspective on the other side of the mirror, the hidden truth under the social varnish. His cinema went behind the beautiful landscapes, behind the quiet comfortable homes of the bourgeoisie, and laid bare the travails and turpitudes of the French. Chabrol could be very nasty and very funny: this is when he was at his best. Chabrol was ferocious but never judgmental or preaching. He didn't have any advice to give us, no message to pass. He may have been a pessimist but one with a furious appetite for life.

In life, his ogre laugh came as a punctuation in the conversation to underline painful memories or the absurdity of it all. Like him, a keen gourmet who often chose the locations of his films according to the number of Michelin-starred restaurants in the area, his France was always sensual, but a sensuality which almost always was the characters' downfall.